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Fun with Vigilance

It’s a 30min buff that you can put on someone else in your raid and while it is active, you will nick 10% of their threat, the damage that they take will be reduced by 3%, and every time they get hit your taunt is refreshed.

When I first read the text, I thought that perhaps the idea was that you slapped it on someone mid-fight if they’d accidentally got aggro — that would not only reduce their threat and how much damage they take but also let you taunt off them quickly.

You can do this if you want. But we have other abilities that are just as good for grabbing a mob that has transferred its undesired attentions to someone else (Intervene, or if the mob is tauntable then just taunt it with the new 30′ ranged taunt).

Ninjaing other people’s threat

The 30min duration hints at another use though. If you put Vigilance on whichever dps is likely to be top of the threat meter, they get some extra breathing space on threat and you get a nice scaling threat talent. Bargain.

If you’re quick with your targetting, you can also swap it around during a fight if the previous holder died or someone else is coming close to you on threat.

If you read forums, you’ll find that a lot of warriors don’t like Vigilance on principle. The basic reason for this is because they’d rather have their threat increased via more damage. Warrior damage is already weak compared to other tanks (while tanking or off-tanking) and while the threat boost is very useful, why not hit two birds with one stone instead of providing a strange pure threat talent that scales with other people’s damage?

The concern is that Blizzard may be balancing tank threat assuming that all warriors have Vigilance. In which case, we’ll always be way behind on damage because they’ll assume we don’t need it. Which is hard to swallow when you see other tanks pulling significantly more dps than you do, while tanking. Tanks aren’t picked for their damage but it’s not a good thing for the gap between top and bottom to be too high.

[edited to add: Actually, the more I think about this, the more I think it’s a daft thing to worry about. The extra dps added to a raid by letting one of your top dps have a 10% higher threat cap is probably way more than you would have done as a tank.]

I think this is mostly ‘sky is falling’ fretting. But we’ll have to wait and see what 3.1 has in store, tank changes are in the works and the proof of what Blizzard actually think/ expect will be in the pudding.

Taunt to victory

Passive threat increases are fine and good but what about the other side-effects of Vigilance? In most fights, taunt is only used in emergencies but sometimes having it available on every global cooldown is precisely what you want. And in those cases, you can Vigilate (it SO should be a word) one of the other tanks … as long as you are sure the fight isn’t threat sensitive for them.

I was messing with this in Naxxramas this week, on Gothik. For those not familiar, this is a fight where there are a lot of adds to pick up in Phase 1 which need to be tanked and killed on a priority basis. I was tanking the live side with a Death Knight helping out. I stuck Vigi on him, knowing that he was bound to be constantly aggroing something. It made it very very easy for me to keep taunting the riders and knights in a fight which is normally quite hectic.

You can use the same trick on Sartharion if you’re picking up adds or elementals. Vigi the main tank and enjoy being able to taunt everything all of the time.

Damage reduction

The other side to Vigilance is that it does reduce damage taken by the target by 3%. Which is another good reason to stick it on a tank in a non threat-sensitive fight. But I haven’t really found a place where I’d use the buff just for that yet. It’s more of a side effect than anything else.

What does Blizzard intend for the talent?

I do love abilities that can be used in several different ways, adapting to the needs of an encounter (I always thought that lifebloom was genius design, for example). But you always end up wondering ‘is this really the use that was intended?’

Is the intention for warriors to be able to taunt constantly or is that an unwanted side effect? If it is the intention then … that’s cool. It does give us something neat that other tanks don’t have, the ability to pick up streams of tauntable mobs quickly and neatly (and from 30′ away).

But that’s also the reason that I have my doubts. I expect that when 3.1 comes live, it will answer my questions about Vigilance and what Blizzard expects us to use it for.

Until then, I’ll be sitting here on the Live side of Gothik, enjoying my uber taunt.

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6 thoughts on “Fun with Vigilance”

I can see why warriors would prefer 10% extra damage, they were the traditional raid MT. I’m writing this as a Paladin Main Tank (ignore my tag name.. it was a brief infatuation!!).

I started out as a Warriors off-tank (his gear/HP were better to start with), and was asked to only use Auto Attack in fights because I needed to save my mana (we get mana back from aggro through dodge/block/parry with BoSanc) and I was taking his aggro and despite the fact he used vigilance on a gung ho Survival Hunter.

This ‘ludicrous’ request was debated in our guild because I moaned about it! I argued the raid needed my dps and that a warrior has a better tool box for off tanking than a paladin. I believed an Intervene/Intercept/Charge taunting warrior is far better in the role…. So we switched places to try it and I noticed that he started using vigilance on me straight away.

I think he was offended initially by my moans, he made a great point about needing rage as much as I needed mana… but he now says is enjoying off tanking more than he thought he would. It seems the perfect line up. He has no problems with Adds, has taunt available all the time and pings about the raid while I maintain an aggro AOE.

I’ve always been a fan of it, and I use it in tons of places. Gothik, OS, Noth (put it on an add tank, and you can chain taunt him when he teleports), Anub’rekan (for adds), Loatheb for Spore Loser spore-hearding, Gluth zombie-hearding – and of course all trash everywhere.

Number one use for Vigilance for me is trash, definitely. With it, most trash dies before the mage AoE can pull agro – a good thing. Second most frequent use is probably abusing the taunt privileges. Having a macro for casting vigilance on the target of target is handy.

I’ve often joked about it as being the “badge of shame” for irresponsible DPS. But, then again, my guild is practically a poster child for irresponsible DPS so, what can you do?

I think it’s an interesting idea, and seems modeled after “Save Da Runts” in warhammer.

BUT.

You mention putting it on an MT to keep your taunt cooled down. Not sure how tanking threat really is these days (used to MT 40 man raids back in the day), but anyone ‘nicking 10% of my threat’ if I’m MTing is going to get a swift kick in the nads, just out of principle.

That would have been a fair response, like with paladins messing around and putting blessing of protection on the tank🙂

It’s just that in Wrath, tank threat has been ramped up hugely (well, in current content at least) so as long as you make sure not to pick a threat sensitive fight, they’d likely be way way more than 10% ahead of the pack.

In Sartharion for example, the Sartharion tank is really the only person on him while the raid busies itself with killing various adds and avoiding fires. So they have a few minutes to build threat and will have tons to spare.